A Good Discourse

 This post requires homework.  First, watch this talk given by Fr. Steve Grunow of Word on Fire.  

Fr.'s words strike me as hitting at the core of what we're trying to do with this conference, trying to remember we need to be active rather than reactive in ministering to the world by our words.  

I've seen it in the demand that we condemn everyone who ever voted for the current President.  I have family and friends I love, who didn't want to vote for the President Elect and who felt strongly that there wasn't a good choice.

The rage at anyone who didn't feel happy voting against one or for the other (and in this respect, it doesn't matter who the other is), was a dupe, a useful idiot, or worse is systemic.  Everyone feels justified in their rage.  Everyone feels that it's time to rage.  It's necessary that the other, feel the rage we feel and know it is directed at them.  That's the problem.  When there is great wrongness, great evil, there is great temptation to feel justfied in rage.  We're not good at righteous anger, we don't stay there. It's too quick and too easy to fall into wrath.  It's why Christ tells Saint James and Saint John they should not reign down fire on the towns that rejected them.    

There's a great struggle in our lives, how do we love someone with whom we disagree, and not lose hold of our values in the process? 

The reality is that social media creates an untrue binaryness of conversation that precludes any both and, and demands instead a fealty to an either or, but declares itself as authoritatively correct.  Real relationships go beyond the binary. Real relationships are messy, hard, and yet forgiving even when we don't want to, not because we wish to be dormats but because we wish to extend the opportunity always for something better than what was.   

The demand that those who are in the wrong beg for forgiveness before offering mercy is itself rooted in the eye for an eye and not the turn the other cheek. People may want to point out, "They had it coming, they deserve it," but this likewise glories in the suffering of others not as merely deserved but richly so. We are spiritually always in danger when we proclaim it safe to enjoy someone suffering, especially if the consequences are really bad. Being on the side of angels means grieving that souls were this wrong, and praying for them with a whole heart that they somehow, through God's grace, heal.   

BUT THEY'RE WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG --They did bad things.  They're evil evil evil evil...we can name their sins.  We know they sinned. We can prove they sinned.   

Yes...but they are also as hard as it is to remember, both and.  They are humans we must encounter. They are enemies we must love. 

If we cannot out mercy God, then we cannot be too merciful to others.   It's a reality we were supposed to really wrap our hearts around in the year of mercy. We still haven't, not by a long shot.  Those who stormed the capital and smeared it and swore to hurt people and did these wrong illegal immoral things, they will face consequences, both in this world and the next.  But we don't get to hate them.  They are the most pitiable of people, showing they lack pity themselves.  

I go back to the reality of how Mary responded to Christ's crucifixion.  If anyone only human could justly rage at the crowd for their wrong thinking, for their group thinking, for their stupidity, it would be her.  She who had not sinned, did not rage at them for crucifying her Son.  If anyone could justly condemning all of the crowd for refusing God's friendship, it would be Christ, and yet even here he offers.   It's beyond us absent grace, great grace.  Yet here, we aspire. 

I'm reading a fantasy novel series to my youngest daughter, and in the denouement, the main protagonist, Taran, Assistant Pig Keeper is shocked that the king, Lord Gwydion declares he will raise a barrow to King Morgant who had betrayed them all in a quest for power. 

"...Gwydion replies, "It is easy to judge evil unmixed," but alas, in most of us, good and bad are closely woven as athe threads on a loom; greater wisdom than mine is needed for the judging.  King Morgant served the Sons of Don long and well," he went on.  "Until the thirst for power parched his throat, he was a fearless adn noble lord. In battle, he saved my life more than once. These things are part of him and cannot be put aside or forgotten. And so shall I honor Morgant," Gwydion said, "For what he hused to be, and Ellidyr Prince of Pen-Llarcau for what he became." (The later had sacrificed himself to rid their world of an evil despite a lifetime of selfishness). --The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander.   

Or, to use a more current favorite fantasy fiction, "The world is not divided between good and death eaters."   

Loving your enemies mean not wishing them anything other than reformation, than restoration, than finding themselves surprised by joy, not abandoned.   If we can see no good in the people around us then we will find ourselves surrounded by monsters, and we will meet the enemy and it will be us. 

Want to be part of the work for a better dialogue, for a stronger sense of how to infuse social media with charity in truth and truth with charity?  Come to "A Good Discourse," and be a part of the dialogue.

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Why I Need A New Baby Jesus

Every year in anticipation of Christmas, we set out the nativity set. I have several, including my favorite, a very large plastic Fontanini version given to us as a wedding gift. The Bishop who married us sagely made sure it could weather the pounding kids give a large set of colorful figurines and barn yard animals. They have endured in part because of their oversized nature.

The smaller sets alas, have not fared as well. When we lost a sheep, I did feel the scriptural pull to search the whole house over but that lost lamb did not have as good a shepherd. I could endure the camel going AWOL and even stomached the angel flying away. After all, we could always substitute a star. Then Joseph went missing. The shepherd made a poor understudy. After a protracted search through the various toy bins, we discovered him amidst a sea of knights, action figures and assorted Thomas the Tank Engine friends.

Eventually, one set got whittled down to the bare essentials, Jesus, Mary and Joseph while another had two magi and a donkey as the extended entourage. I could live with these redacted versions for the most part. After all, these were reminders of the real event, and if my children knew the story, even these half measures were sufficient.

However, my daughter whose birthday falls dangerously close to December 25th also has a nativity set that has been added to every Christmas. It has long since expanded past the stable and its core members to include the neighboring town folk and fields. This year, within minutes of having set up her scene however, the baby Jesus went missing.

I was certain one of her toddler sisters had walked off with it so I made some inquiries. The two year old smiled, nodded and toddled off saying something that sounded like "Trash." I paused to consider whether I would take the word of a not yet potty trained child as to the whereabouts of the most important figure in the nativity story. Toddlers do not make good witnesses I told myself after spying the garbage can brimming over.

Theoretically, the figurine should be at the top. But I knew if I looked, I'd wind up digging through the entire smelly contents. I also knew if I didn't take a peek and didn't find it, I'd rue the fact that I hadn't at least opened the bag. It took a walk around the house looking to steel up my nerve to open the trash. I was "checking other obvious places first," I told myself.

Opening the trash bag yielded nothing. Nor did the subsequent smelly sticky digging. The debate in my mind as to when I would have sifted through enough to constitute a thorough search and satisfy my conscience and maternal guilt was as fierce as the smell.

Then the owner of the nativity set came into the kitchen. She looked at her crèche with a fierce pleased pride. "Good idea hiding the Baby Jesus Mom. He shouldn't be there until Christmas."

Mentally thanking her for the out and mildly amused that she didn't find the idea of her mother knee deep in debris the least bit odd, I vowed to get a replacement and wrap it in a box to be the first present opened Christmas day. Bagging up and abandoning the search, I washed my hands and decided to tackle the replacement another day; still hoping that the Baby Jesus might turn up when I least expected it.

So now, when I think of what I need for Christmas, the answer is what Christmas is supposed to be; I need the baby Jesus. And although I’ve ordered a new one, I still know it’s possible that He may show up when I’m not looking reminding me that the time before Christmas is about being watchful and waiting.

(Ran last year 12/10/09 This year, not one figurine has gone AWOL, but it's still early in the season).

Summer Meme

I was never good at tag as a kid.  I never caught anyone.   So if I got tagged, the game was essentially over.   However, in blog tags, I'd never yet been tagged so today, I'm happy to say, "I'm it!" 

The Ironic Catholic tagged me at her post today. 

My five favorite devotions are: 

1) Saint Bridgette's devotion --fifteen Our Fathers and fifteen Hail Mary's, every day for a year.  It is for all the souls in purgatory but it is also my daily reminder to pray and because it is daily, I do find myself doing it during laundry or dishes or taking out the garbage.  It means that any activity I do can become mindful and for that, I am very grateful.

2) Saint Louis de Montfort's Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary:  This has been an ongoing pleasure and challenge for the past (it's hard to believe it has been this long), seven years.   When we have the days where we're doing the litany and the rosary and still have to keep up with Saint Bridgette's, you sometimes feel like you are marathon praying and in truth, you are. 

3) The Divine Mercy devotion:  This was something I said while sitting at the hospital with Paul; it gave me great comfort.  I use it when I'm stressed out; when the Holy Spirit wants me to focus on mercy because I am becoming to harsh or too hard or too sad. 

4) The Rosary:  The rosary always surprises me with how much I love it.  Mary's devotion is my go to when I can't figure out anything to do prayer.  She provides me with my everyone needs to be quiet because everyone is fighting and I want to hit the reset button prayer. Mary also stands ready when I this more often prayer.

can't sleep, I can't cope, or even worse, I don't want to cope prayer.   She is always my why don't I pray
5)  Adoration:  I have loved it whenever I have gone; I have felt pierced and fed whenever I have gone.  Like the rosary, I know it is always there and always possible.  (There's a perpetual adoration chapel just a mile and a half from me).  Yet like the rosary, I do not avail myself of its riches as often as I could or should.  You have to know there are no coincidences with God and the fact that I was thinking only yesterday of how I should go and today, I get a reminder via a blog meme, that this is something I will have to simply schedule and go do. 

Now I get to tag five other bloggers to consider how the devotions they cherish feed them and invite them to share. 
My Wonderful Life
Cheeky Pink Girl
Adrienne's Corner
Violin Mama
Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering

And I realize what a relief it was to never catch anyone because I now sit here thinking of all the other bloggers I could have tagged but didn't.   Ah well.  In the meantime, tag! You're it!

What Do I Do Now?

Here I am, my children all safely tucked away in beds 2,100 miles away from me.  My husband took them to visit his folks while I flew to Texas to see my parents and one of my brothers and my sister, her husband and their almost one year old daughter.   I am here and I do not have a role.  I cannot Martha my way around the room because there is nothing to Martha. 

What I have discovered is I would make a boring batchellorette.  I read the paper.  I write little.  I eat too much and I exercise.  Time unfolds at a snails pace with nary a rushed moment and I'm groping for ways to fill the minutes. It is odd to have no job.  The quiet of my own mind is more than I've come to be accustomed to in 17 years of parenting.  It's like I'm a Supreme Pizza that forgot all the toppings or the one pin left standing after a failed spare.  I am glad to be with these people I love fiercely.  I'm grateful for the trip and for this time.

I also feel fully aware of how whittled down my own life becomes in the absence of my children. But, as my sage brother pointed out, when I return, it will be to launch back into school after spring break.  Thinking about the bills and the projects coming due, the laundry that will await me and suddenly, I guess I will just savor this spare time a bit more.  It will probably make the time seem to fly by faster as a result.

But this is Martha being told to sit and Mary.  It is a lot more difficult than one would suspect. It will be a bear to one day retire.

Advent Begins

It's the first week of Advent and already, I'm impatient.

Coming two months early to start, I guess I always have been. It doesn't explain why I'm always late everywhere, but it does shed light on my inability to diet, budget or maintain a cleaning routine. It also explains why I struggle beyond the easy level with Rock Band, I keep jumping the count.

Like everyone, I am my own worst enemy. Original sin just messes with every gift we have if we let it and I do all too often. Delayed gratification is something I struggle with; I like the immediate hit of a comment on a blog and thus often surrender the better prize of a crafted publishable piece. I eat the pie when it's served. I don't take pitches and I panic in the pocket in touch football. The present that is perfect at first glance is too much to not purchase. I don't like looking, I like finding. God knows this, so He placed my future husband in front of me first day of college.

This year's prayer theme was "Wait on the Lord." Essentially, my husband and I have thrown this line out at each other all year long whenever things got hard. Sometimes it has meant serve, other times it has meant patience and most infuriating, sometimes it has meant both. Advent is the Church's "Wait on the Lord" instruction to all of us.

You'd think a year of meditating on this bit of wisdom would have paid off, but I still give hints about presents if they're really cool gifts. I used to do my shopping last minute so I wouldn't mess up and tell people what I'm giving. My current solution had been to tell SOMEONE what I got someone else but even that makes it harder for me not to give more hints to the recipient. It comes down to the fact that I don't like secrets and really stink at surprises. I've always found out what each kid I was having was. I always jumped up and down the last week hoping the time would be sooner than the induced date scheduled. Again, God knows how to work around my flaws and never has indulged my impatience on this point.

Even the one kid who was premature made me sit for a week and the other one that needed an emergency c-section made my husband wait in a room alone to pray while the doctors got ready. I had to wait to find out she'd been born, I didn't feel a thing and she didn't cry at first. Then we got the shock of great joy and that was what we needed, seeing her face and touching her cheek. This is what Christmas is; the shock of the angels, the shock of the star, the shock of the little family in the stable being the salvation of the world; the shock of seeing the one you love completely for the first time.

Christmas is the scheduled delivery day when time will slow down, when we will look around and miss whoever is not there, and feel the day would be better, more and more wonderful if everyone were in one place. We will long for Heaven because Earth only hints with all it's wonder and beauty and bounty but does not satisfy and we really really know it.

So as of today, the all Christmas carols radio station(with the notable exception of a few banned for life tunes), is allowed. We made a list of what we hope to have happen during these next few weeks but have promised not to freak at what doesn't. I will try to "Be still and know He is there." Holding onto the infant Jesus I know will bring the strong true peace not of this world but right now, out in the fields, it's hard not to want to run straight for that star. But then I remember, "Wait on the Lord." So I'm waiting. I'm not patient, but I'm waiting.

Have a blessed Advent.

Why the Notre Dame/Obama Scandal Matters

My husband and I met at Notre Dame on the third day after we arrived on our respective campuses. After four years of dating while at Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s, and two years of engagement wherein I received a Master’s of Education at Boston College, and my then fiancée attended NYU law school, we were married by the Bishop of Beaumont, Texas, Bishop Bernard Ganter in 1990. Nine children and no small number of Notre Dame T-shirts and sojourns out for games or to visit friends later, we find ourselves looking at a school we no longer recognize as the place that helped preserve our pure spirits, that helped keep youthful desires in check with such quaint restrictions as visiting hours.

Where we once argued against Mario Cuomo and were not scoffed at, now we see a school that seems both hard headed and in part, hard hearted. We do not understand this beautiful place that no longer recognizes the source of its fundamental beauty. When people of good character and deep faith ask how this school (which they know we love), can authentically represent Catholicism, (indeed, Mary in all her glory), if we cannot recognize life at its beginning as being sacred to those who do not believe it, I have no answer.

We will be praying the rosary. We are praying the rosary. We pray for the President to have the scales fall from his eyes and for this most anti-life of all presidents in the history of our country to become like Saint Paul. We pray for Fr. Jenkins and those who stand fast with him on this point. We pray for their hearts to be softened by the weeping and anguish of the faithful who see this as a far more egregious assault on Catholic sensibilities than the erotic pseudo intellectual musings of an artistically contrived lesbian play. The later is self absorbed mental porn packaged as art, the former is a rejection of everything our Lady stands for and everything her life means, for the sake of a photo-op and the bragging rights amongst Universities for hosting the current President of the United States.

The rejection of the timeless for the transitory, of the prayerful for the powerful injures more than just those graduates and families and alumni who may not be entirely thrilled with President Jenkin’s choice. Those who never loved Notre Dame but love the policies of the current President of the United States, seem to find almost perverse glee that the faithful, (who cannot be anything but pro-life), agonize over this once crown jewel of Catholicism falling so far from her truly once upon a time deserving heights. Being the body of Christ, all of the Church, all of us that make up the countless unknown laity that line up for the Eucharist on a weekly basis or more, we suffer each time a Catholic in a position of leadership denies Mary, denies Christ, or denies the authentic reality of each person, by their policies and actions and words.

The University of Notre Dame should mean something. It should embody the beauty of Mary, the humility of Mary, the obedience of Mary, the purity of Mary, the whole dedication to Christ of Mary. It should be a place that creates people of steel and fire, people who know how precious life is, and how important it is to be obedient to God in all things. The University should radiate the essence of Mary in all its policies and in all of its classes, and in every bit of ground.

No one who contemplates this Queen of heaven with a sincere heart, cannot be softened by her witness, by her love, by her life and her instruction. “Do whatever He tells you to do.” This should be the great lesson that all students come to master as a result of their experience at this campus, whether in physics or art or sociology or economics.

The purpose of a Catholic University is not to win accolades or host world leaders or build the largest endowment in the history of man or have the greatest number of federal dollars in grants for its research purposes. The purpose of a Catholic University is to via the craft and art of instruction, through the sense of place and the beauty of minds and persons represented in the faculty and staff, to turn souls towards God while putting before the students, the richest banquet possible of all the best thoughts, practices and experiences available. The purpose of a Catholic University is to pursue the Truth in all things. Modern sensibilities would parse Truth and reduce it to being merely a religious tenet, and that only scholarly truth should be so ruthlessly sought in the academic world.

But Christ tells us clearly, “I am the way and the Truth and the Life.” If we would be Catholic, if Notre Dame would be Catholic, it must know Truth, it must love Truth, and it must pursue Truth over politics, over power, over prestige. And the Truth in this circumstance is humble and small and achingly real in the person of Mary.

Notre Dame Our Mother, Pray for us. And Our Hearts forever, Love Thee Notre Dame.

Today's Four Horsemen of Notre Dame

Yesterday, I took my oldest four to see Pope Benedict XVI at Washington National Park. It was a profound moment to be part of a mass with 46 thousand faithful and the pontiff.

The only issue, leaving the stadium, there were protesting evangelists who had six feet tall banners declaring "IF YOU BELIEVE THE POPE, YOU ARE GOING TO HELL" and "WHERE IN THE BIBLE DO YOU FIND PRAYING TO MARY, PURGATORY, INDULGENCES? YOU HAVE BEEN LIED TO!" While I was irritated to be accosted instantly upon leaving a beautiful mass, I explained to my children, this was part of the beauty of the country we lived in, anyone could say and believe anything.

I would have been content with the live and let live benevolence if the man had not then produced a bullhorn and started accosting anyone wearing a pro-Pope Benedict t-shirt...including small children. My small children were home with their father, but I growled that a grown man thought a five year old was a fair target for his vitriol. Still, I had to be an example. My oldest was fifteen. He saw the incident and wanted to take the man on, "He's spouting inaccuracies..." he would attack on substance, toe to toe. I told him "No."

The densely packed street made movement slow, allowing the man to shout and shout and shout, wearing down my goodwill and willingness to be charitable. "The Church wanted to Kill Martin Luther..."

My son shot back, "He died of natural causes." The man didn't know who said it, but felt called to call us "Sheep." The kids looked to me...I pointed out that in the parable, Jesus separated the sheep from the goats --sheep were good things. They looked mollified...slightly.

My oldest two took out their papal flags and waved them deliberately, starting something of a silent cascade behind them in protest of yellow banners. The man grew bolder in his assertions of our foolishness.

Finally, I growled to the man next to me...if he attacks my children, I'm going Old Testament. Wrath of God..." The man had been talking to me about the music, he was part of the choir. "But we're supposed to turn the other cheek."

"Yes," I countered, "But luckily, we're Catholic so if we don't, there's always confession..."

Looking at the man now pointing at teens and saying, "You're on the wrong path. This pope lies."

The man nodded his head. "I wonder if I could find a priest..." he asked aloud.
...the kids laughed..."Of course, there's the little problem with remorse...that might take a few days." The choir now was laughing.

We were almost past the very angry man when he started in on Mary, Mother of God. Other women and men in the choir were debating what to do, discussing what was the holy response. I did like the answer by someone, "Just punch him." I had to agree, it seemed the most effective or at least emotionally satisfying.

The kids were clearly troubled by this new attack, so as a group, we huddled and said a vocal "Hail Mary, followed by Notre Dame Our Mother, Pray for Him." Go Irish!